The Temporal System of Noun-Modifying (Attributive) Clauses in Korean from a Typological Perspective

The temporal system of noun-modifying clauses in Korean manifests a three-way aspectual opposition among non-prior imperfective, prior imperfective, and morphologically unmarked perfective, a crosslinguistically common pattern manifested in West African languages, creole languages, Persian, and Lakhota, etc. The semantic and mor-phosyntactic distribution of temporal expressions in noun-modifying clauses in Korean cannot be characterized with the temporal dimension of aspectual distinctions such as completion, ongoingness, inception, duritivity, but with the totality dimension of aspectual distinctions of whether the speaker's viewpoint is within or outside the event frame in which the situation described takes place.